Legal News

Fehr Ball! Players? Union Wins Back Drug-Test Results, Samples

By Ashby Jones

Don Fehr shouldn’t have a care in the world. The head of Major League Baseball’s Players’ Association announced earlier this year that he was hanging up his wingtips no later than next year. In a perfect world, he’d be making a big victory tour of the nation’s ballparks, trying to get his picture taken with Ryan Howard, wheedling a signed jersey out of Albert Pujols, that kind of thing.

But as luck would have it, Fehr’s still got some business to oversee, this unpleasant little business of trying best he can to keep any more players from getting fingered as a steroids users. After all, with each subsequent Alex Rodriguez-eque revelation, Fehr’s star — which otherwise shines pretty brightly — dims just a touch.

So Fehr must have been happy with today’s news out of the Ninth Circuit. An en banc panel on Wednesday afternoon ruled that the drug-test records of more than 100 players seized as part of an investigation into the use of steroids must be returned to the union. Click here for the Bloomberg report, here for the AP report; here for the opinion.

What we have here is a Fourth Amendment issue. Agents investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, aka Balco, in 2004 had a warrant for results on tests of 10 players. But during the search, they discovered computer records on test results for many more players not named in the warrant. The government seized the data and the damning urine samples.

Fehr’s organization sued, arguing the seizures were illegal. The union won in a lower court, but that decision was reversed in 2007 by a three-judge appeals panel. Today's en banc ruling overturns that earlier ruling.

Chris Dahl, a union spokesman, told Bloomberg that that Fehr would likely make a statement about the ruling later. Jack Gillund, a spokesman for the San Francisco U.S. Attorney's office, which led the Balco investigation, told Bloomberg that prosecutors are reviewing the ruling and weighing their options.

The ruling, we’d imagine, is all fine and good. But there’s still nothing to stop people with knowledge of the names from leaking them to the press, the way it happened with A-Rod. On that front, we imagine, Fehr just has to sit tight and hope for the best.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 26, 2009 (boomark / email).